It is the sort of frustration that is only too familiar. You go into a bookshop to look for The Collected Works of Marcus Tullius Cicero, and do they have a copy? Do they heck. A Treatise on the Analytic Geometry of Three Dimensions? Nothing doing. Theakston's Guide to Scarborough? Completely out of stock. There's lots of John Grisham, though.

From next week a small revolution in bookselling will make searching for obscure, out-of-print and otherwise long-forgotten books a whole lot easier. Instead of checking in vain on Amazon and then spending weeks trawling the nation's second-hand bookshops, you will be able to go into a shop, say, “I would like a copy of North American Starfishes by Alexander Agassiz, please,” and then watch it being printed out in a twinkling.

The bookseller Blackwell is installing a machine on a three-month trial at its store in London that can print out any one of about 400,000 titles within a few minutes. It prints something that looks like a book, feels like a book and, to all intents and purposes, is indistinguishable from the thousands of other titles on the shop's shelves (except for the hardbacks, of course, and the sort of blockbuster fiction that has the author's name on the front in big, raised, shiny letters, but then you can't have everything).

By summer Blackwell hopes to have more than a million books in its catalogue, the equivalent of 23 miles of shelving, or 50 bookshops.

Printing on demand is already an established phenomenon in the publishing world and the Espresso Book Machine in Blackwell's is not the first in Britain. It is, however, the first time that printing on demand has been offered to the public in a British bookshop.

Yesterday The Times was offered a special preview at Blackwell's in Charing Cross Road, in which we were allowed to print the book of our choice and take it away, literally hot off the presses. How hot? Well, the glue used to bind the book is heated to 350F, that's how hot. It has cooled down by the time it pops out at the end, though.

Our first attempt to print a book was not entirely successful. The Times's choice - from a rather limited list, the full catalogue not being available until next week - was a 1919 volume called Heroes of Aviation, a book of stirring tales of such First World War flying aces as Albert Ball and someone called Georges Guynemer The Miraculous, which was unavailable for more than half a century until it was revived by an online publisher.

Thor Sigvaldason, co-founder of On Demand Books, the people behind the machine, clicked a mouse and it started making whirry, photocopier-like noises. Laser-printed pages started flying out from the first half of the machine into the second, where the book is made. It was clamped, glued, stuck to the cover, cut to size and spewed out of a letterbox-sized slot in the side of the machine - where it promptly fell apart.

“Things do happen,” said Mr Sigvaldason, phlegmatically. “It is actually perfectly bound. It just doesn't have a cover.”

Another attempt and, after 13 minutes - rather slow, but then there was a pause to empty the wastepaper box - a perfect, warm and rather industrial-smelling copy of Heroes of Aviation was in my hands, mint-fresh and looking just like a real book. Which it was.

Blackwell's chief executive, Andrew Hutchings, is convinced that the machine could be the innovation that will help conventional bookshops survive the onslaught from online retailers. “It is about revitalising bookshops, making them compelling again,” he said. “We want to consign to history the idea that you can walk into a bookshop and not find the book you want.”

The prospects for readers - and authors - are enticing. Even a giant such as Amazon is limited by what publishers are prepared to keep in print, and they in turn are constrained by what booksellers are prepared to keep on their shelves. Once-celebrated authors such as Ivy Compton-Burnett can be hard to find, even in second-hand shops, and there are many titles from the back catalogue of writers such as Penelope Lively and Muriel Spark that are no longer in print.

Blackwell is convinced that this machine is the future but is still trying to work out whether it has got its pricing right. It charges shelf price for books still in print and 10p a page for old titles, making a 300-page book a hefty £30.

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